I’ve always wanted to fight a desperate battle against incredible odds.

  These words of Navigator First Class Grigg in The Last Starfighter capture a dream of many an adventurer:  the wish to face an incredible horde of the enemy, and bring them to their knees.  Whether it is Aragorn and his two companions pursuing an orc war party, or a dozen cowboys fighting a hundred bandits, or Ali Baba outwitting forty thieves, there is something glorious about such a battle, no matter how you win, and even if you lose.

  On the other side of the screen, there is an equal desire for such scenes.  What referee has not wished to bring the enemy down in force against the player characters at some turn, to run that battle that will go down in memory as the night they faced that incredible horde?  Whether they killed them all, escaped with their lives, or died nobly in the thick of the fight hardly seems to matter.  It is just being there that will be remembered.  Remember the Alamo.  There were no survivors there, but every man of the one hundred eighty-nine slain is thought a hero, and the tale is told still today.  Santa Ana declared it a “glorious victory” for his side, but his own lieutenant was quoted to the effect of, “One more such glorious victory, and we’re finished.”  Nick Champion did not survive the siege at the K C Ranch, but in single-handedly holding an army of fifty gunmen at bay most of the day he gave opportunity for the sheriff to be alerted and to organize a posse to trap the attackers and end the Johnson County War.  What of the Light Brigade, immortalized in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, six hundred forty-seven British light cavalry who rode horses and wielded sabers against Russian cannon flanking on three sides, who dealt serious damage to the artillerists and returned with three hundred ninety still able to continue the fight another day in the Crimean war?  At Agincourt Henry V didn’t know his badly outnumbered British cavalry had defeated the French until they sent word of their defeat to him.  Grigg was right.  It makes for a great moment of glory, no matter how it ends.

  The problem, in most games, is that the creation and organization of such an army is more work than the average referee can manage in a week of lunch hours; and most of us have better things to do with our lunch hours, such as, for example, eat lunch.  How can you effectively create and run such a force without having it consume your life for several months in advance?

  There are several tricks of the trade that can be used to good effect in this regard.

  For those of you whose facility with computers permits their use for your own purposes, as opposed to merely doing what others have decided to facilitate, it’s rather simple to create a program that generates large numbers of individual creatures.  (I’ve done it, so it must be pretty simple.)  Even Basic has a random number generator, by which such variable values as damage points, weapon choice, and pocket change can be generated, written to a matrix, and fed to a document quite easily, producing hundreds of individual enemies who can be ticked off one at a time from printouts.  Fanfold paper is wonderful for this, if you’ve got it.  I keep the framework of such a program on my drive, and modify it at need when I’m running certain games that require such variation in creatures.

  However, despite the perception that gamers and computer programmers are all the same group, the majority of readers probably are not so computer literate as to be able to create such a program and probably don’t have the programming tools on their computers to do so; and those who are and do most likely are sufficiently capable that they can create such a program without such meager help as I might offer.  We can discuss it in the forums for anyone who wants to attempt it who has questions, but in the main this is not going to be the best solution for most gamers.  Fortunately, it is not the only solution.

  It may seem as if each one of four hundred goblins would be a unique individual.  After all, following the old Monster Manual statistics, each one has at least one and not more than seven hit points, each carries one of seven different weapon combinations (sword and pole arm, sword and sling, sword and spear, sling only, morning star only, pole arm only, or spear only), and each has at least three but not more than eighteen silver coins in whatever passes for its pockets.  That’s seven hundred eighty four different possible combinations for ordinary goblins (not including the obligatory additional extraordinary leader types that appear with such great numbers), for which the probability of appearance of any one type varies greatly.  Yet how likely are the players to notice that this particular goblin who has fifteen silver coins in his pocket happens to be the same as that goblin who also had fifteen silver coins, also had five hit points, and also carried a sword and sling?  If you created twenty different goblins and used each of them twenty times, probably no one would know the difference.

  The convenience of this method may be enhanced by creating your goblins in small groups, three to six in each group, and then combining the groups in different ways.  For example, the first group might contain three goblins with swords, one of which has a pole arm, one a sling, and one a spear.  This could be put with the second group, consisting of four which include a morning star, a pole arm, and two spears.  The third group might have two slings, a sword and pole arm, a sword and spear, a pole arm, and a spear.  Combining this last group of six with either of the other two will give a different set on the field, and disguise the fact that you’re using the same combinations of goblins repeatedly.

  If you prefer, you can create those twenty different goblins solely on the basis of hit points and pocket change, and print twenty pages of these (the Word Processor is your friend), each with a different heading indicating what weapons are used by this group.  You can then organize homogenous groups, such as the rock throwers in a unit of all slings or a phalanx of spears holding the line on one flank; or mix-and-match combinations, such as a well-defended slings unit with pole arms in the front rank to hold attackers at bay.  Simply use one mark to indicate that the third goblin on this page is already in a unit, and another to indicate that it’s dead.

  I assure you that your players won’t notice the similarities, perhaps not even if you tell them; and if you do tell them, they probably won’t care.

  Multiverser uses a different technique for such creatures and characters.  We refer to them as One Each characters.  The notion here, as with mooks in some games, is that the differences between the individual members of such hordes are not significant to play, and they may be treated as identical.  The difference between One Each adversaries and mooks is that the former may individually be quite formidable, opponents of considerable power, as long as it is acceptable for them to be identical.  Thus you could have a unit of one each giants, or one each mechanoids, each of which is functionally the same in terms of game stats.  Create one, and you have them all.  Mooks function similarly, except that these are generally cannon fodder, assumed to be insignificant in their abilities to harm the heroes beyond delaying their progress and consuming their resources.  It’s a practical way to deal with large numbers of opponents, by making the differences between them unimportant.

  Sometimes you can split the difference between prepared individual creatures and uniform mooks.  Consider an army of three hundred fifty kobolds.  By the book (that is, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ Monster Manual) you have thirty-five of each of short sword and spear, short sword only, and spear only; seventy with axe; one hundred five armed with spiked wooden clubs; maybe seventeen with short sword and javelin and another fifty-three with two to three javelins each.  But kobolds never have more than four hit points, and long swords, the favored weapon of many adventurers, do an average of four and a half points of damage before bonuses.  Thus it’s reasonable to suppose in advance that the number of hit points for any individual kobold isn’t going to matter for at least half those in the battle.  Rather than rolling all the hit points before combat begins, keep a four-sided die handy.  If the damage done by the attacker is less than four points, roll the other die to see whether this particular kobold is one who can survive such an attack.  (For experience purposes, assume that the average hit points of all kobolds is two and a half, and thus three hundred fifty kobolds have eight hundred seventy five hit points between them.  This also saves you the trouble of adding up all those individual hit points to get the total.)

  Now that you have your armies, what do you do with them?  That is, just because you’ve created a thousand opponents in five different types doesn’t mean you’re in a position to roll hit rolls for each of them on each round of combat.  You’re in for a long slow battle if you handle it that way.  What are the alternatives?  That raises a lot more issues; but then, it’s probably more than can be covered in this article, so we’ll leave it for the moment and return to it another time.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.